Sarfraz Manzoor

I got back from Hay yesterday. It was a really great week, not least because it was just so gloriously sunny. We stayed in a lovely cottage and I spent the week reading the books ahead of my interviews, roaming around the second hand book stores and seeing a few sessions. The discussion between AN Wilson and Rowan WIlliams was fantastic. The sessions I did went pretty well, Reza Aslan is a real star and I didn’t really need to ask him anything as he is such a great performer as well as being an insightful thinker. I enjoyed that session a lot. Monica Ali is a friend and so talking to her was great too-we ended up doing two sessions as the first one sold out. I don’t want to go through all of them but basically it was all really good fun and I felt rather sad at having to leave Hay and return to London. There is a real sense of being somewhere special, and the temporary nature of the festival only adds to it. I used to get the same sense going to Glastonbury, its a sense of an imagined community made briefly real. At Hay it is a community that loves reading and ideas and is filled basically with lovely polite people. If only the real world was like the Hay Festival.